Tomorrow, the entire City of Seattle website is scheduled to launch a new look, “making services more accessible,” according to the mayor’s office. Today, Seattle City Light> is already a bit ahead of the curve – with a new “outage tracker” already online. City Light’s Scott Thomsen walked us through it: Go to the SCL home page at seattle.gov/light – and note the System Status box in the right sidebar:
Caveat, this will look different after tomorrow’s redesign launches – but the same info will be available in this order, toward the top of the page. If there’s an outage, a click in the box will take you to a map, where the outage will be marked in red (the bigger the outage, the bigger the mark, but as you zoom in on the map, you’ll get to something like this) – a click on the red brings up a bubble with outage basics:
The biggest thing, Thomsen explains, is that this will be updated every 15 minutes, and it will automatically get new information from what City Light workers are learning from callers and crew members. Previously, the utility used a seldom-used webpage that sometimes displayed outage information – and more often didn’t – Thomsen explains that it wasn’t linked into outage-related info the way this new one is. In addition, the old system wouldn’t be called into action for small outages; this one will show outages of any size. You still need to call and report them, he emphasizes – City Light does not yet have the technology to automatically detect them. But the new software enabling the online “system status” will enable more features around next February, Thomsen adds – perhaps even phone notifications when the outage at your house is over.
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